The most important goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is obviously, rankings. Of late, digital marketers have been trying to downplay the importance of rankings in favor of more branded signals to Google’s search algorithms, in an attempt to conform to the search behemoth’s quality guidelines. However, your site’s rankings for your chosen keywords will […]

The most important goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is obviously, rankings. Of late, digital marketers have been trying to downplay the importance of rankings in favor of more branded signals to Google’s search algorithms, in an attempt to conform to the search behemoth’s quality guidelines.

However, your site’s rankings for your chosen keywords will always be important until search results are displayed in order of 1, 2, 3… No surprise then, that in-house SEO experts and agency marketers alike are always on the lookout for every little technical tweak that can take them one step closer to the elusive No. 1 position on Google.

SEO and digital marketing tool suite (the de-facto industry leader) has conducted one of the most in-depth studies ever into the ranking factors that take a website to the top of Google.

Their machine learning based analysis of 6 lakh search results from 10 crore real internet users searching across Google’s Indian, US, UK and other versions throws up some interesting facts on how they rank websites!

For a high-level analysis, read on.

Here’s a graphic that shows the 17 most crucial signals for ranking on Google:

Image Credits: https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors/

There are some clear takeaways that emerge from the study…

Direct website traffic tops all other factors.

This is the single most significant finding of this study. Direct traffic is when the user comes to your website straight from the browser (by entering your URL in the address bar or clicking a bookmark) or a saved document (such as PDF), instead of clicking through from the search results or social media shares.

Numerous other studies on ranking factors have neglected to consider this critical factor, because of the possibility of correlation – i.e. Google ranks the best sites, but naturally, the best sites have more traffic.

However, the SEMrush study highlights Google’s increasing focus on the “brand authority” of a website. When direct traffic to a site increases, it is a strong indication that the brand is growing stronger. This means businesses need to redouble their PR efforts to build brand awareness and brand affinity for their products, inducing customers to proactively search for their brand terms

Eventually, Google will pick up on these “entity searches” and pass on the credit to your website.

User experience is paramount to success.

Google has repeatedly advised digital marketers to chase users instead of the algorithm. And they plainly mean it. Direct traffic is followed by three metrics closely related to user behavior on the ranking factors chart:

Time on site: The amount of time the average user spends on the site per visit

Pages per session: The number of pages viewed by a user per visit

Bounce rate: The ratio of visitors who leave your site after viewing a single page to those who stick around for more

Taken together, these three metrics tell Google whether or not users really find what they’re looking for on your website, and how engaging it is to your audience. In marketing parlance, they reveal the “relevance” of your content to the searcher’s “intent.”

These user-specific ranking factors underscore the value of your content. Google has time and again emphasized the importance of creating quality content through their webmaster guidelines and hangouts. If your site delivers what users are looking for, Google is sure to reward you for it.

Links do matter.

Backlinks are at the building blocks of Google’s original PageRank algorithm, which still forms the core of its ranking system. This is reflected in the fact that elements number 5 to 8 on the chart are link-specific metrics. The quantity and quality of backlinks, the variety of domains they come from as well as the spread of their IP addresses, all play a role in pushing up your rankings.

While Google discourages link building solely for SEO purposes, the fact remains that great content garners the maximum amount of links, along with closely relevant anchor text. This, in turn, plays a big role in enhancing brand authority, eventually bringing more referral as well as direct traffic (the biggie, remember?) to the website.

Ultimately, it’s important not to focus narrowly on any single aspect of link building, such as IPs or “followed” links. Marketers should focus on developing a diverse backlink profile, built on the back of multi-channel PR and content marketing.

You can start small with low-volume keywords, and eventually move on to targeting the more competitive ones, as your content base increases and your existing links start to bring in traffic.

Google is on a mission to make the web safer with HTTPS.

Google is going all out to persuade webmasters across the world to move to HTTPS in their quest to make the web a secure place. HTTPS maintains the integrity of your website data, prevents intruders from tapping into your communication with users, and protects their privacy.

Google is doing everything it can to coax website owners into adopting HTTPS – and they’ve found a simple, but effective way: ranking HTTPS sites above their HTTP counterparts, all else being equal.

If you’re still biding your time, the time to make the switch has come. The higher the volume of keywords you’re targeting and the bigger your website, the more important HTTPS adoption becomes. Without a secure site, you’ll soon be relegated to the sidelines and watch your rivals pass you by.

Keywords are losing their shine.

SEO practitioners have been terribly obsessed with keywords for a long, long time. This has frequently led them to cross the line into spamming, by stuffing HTML tags and content with keywords, giving the SEO industry a bad name and lessening its importance.

Also, read:

With updates like Hummingbird and RankBrain, Google has got its act together when it comes to semantics and understanding content. Peppering your headlines, copy and meta tags with keywords will no longer give you even a slight advantage.

SEMrush found that more than 35% of sites that ranked for high-volume keywords didn’t even have the keyword in the title. Talk about meeting users’ intent by speaking their language!

Over to You

SEO forms the core of your digital marketing efforts. When it comes to building an effective SEO strategy that works for your business, every little bit helps. Engaging content, brand authority, links from the right places and a secure website, all play their part. Analyzing Google’s algorithm is a complex and demanding process, and it pays to stay updated on the factors that influence rankings. Good luck!

People who are just getting started with a new internet business often get that common feeling that search engine optimization is too technical while the competition in SERPs is enormous. So generally SEO isn’t worth the effort. While it’s true that there are some niches where it’s hard to succeed, that’s not the case for […]

People who are just getting started with a new internet business often get that common feeling that search engine optimization is too technical while the competition in SERPs is enormous. So generally SEO isn’t worth the effort.

While it’s true that there are some niches where it’s hard to succeed, that’s not the case for many other industries. Quite often, when you look at a particular vertical, you’ll find that it’s not as saturated as you think, and competitors have a very limited understanding of SEO. So you only have to get the basics right to have immediate success.

Part of the reason is that many business owners don’t have enough time to spend on creating and implementing a good SEO strategy. So they decide to hire someone to do it for them. The inherent risk with this course of action is that when you don’t understand the basics of the work that needs to be done, you can easily get ripped off.

So, no matter whether you’re just getting started with DIYSEO or planning on hiring someone to do it for you, this guide will give you everything you need to know to succeed with generating organic traffic for your website.

We’ll go through the following vital SEO basics:

How to figure out what your customers are searching for

How to optimize your pages so they rank for your keywords

How to make sure your website is accessible and convenient to both search engines and human visitors

And finally, how to get other websites to link to your site

Keep reading to learn the best practices for each of these aspects of SEO and how to apply them to your website.

Step 1: Figure out what your target customers are searching for

While many people think of SEO as an inherently technical discipline — no matter whether you’re researching keywords, optimizing your site, or analyzing competitors to understand what they’re doing — the reality is that SEO is predominantly about understanding who your customers are and what they care about.

That doesn’t necessarily need to be done using any SEO tactics, in fact, the best way to get started with it is by talking to your clients and listening to their feedback. Here are some of the obvious places where you can start:

Comments on your website

Emails from customers

Your phone/chatline

Events where you meet with customers

Keep an eye not just on what they’re saying, but also what language they’re using. Start building a list of topics your audience is interested in and the terms they use.

To get a better idea of how that would look in practice, we’ll use an example.

Let’s say we’re working on SEO for a new hotel/bed&breakfast in Dublin, Ireland. We don’t have customers yet, so we use common sense to come up with several ways people may search online to find us:

‘hotels in Dublin’

‘hotel in Dublin’

‘place to stay in Dublin’

‘accommodation Dublin’

There are quite a few terms we can come up with, and while that’s always helpful, your primary concern at this point is not to create a super-extensive list.

Get a general idea of how people discuss your topic

My next step is to pick one of the terms I came up with and run it through Keywords Explorer in Ahrefs:
Ahrefs gives me a whole bunch of useful information on that keyword. I see that ‘hotel in Dublin’ gets a good amount of searches in the US, it’s popular in Ireland and the UK, and (most importantly) it is a part of a larger topic ‘Dublin hotels’ that gets a lot more searches.

I also get numerous suggestions for related keywords that Ahrefs presents using several keyword generation methods.

In just a few minutes with Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, I’ve managed to identify a high-volume keyword that our potential customers can use to find my website. Besides I’ve got a whole bunch of other keywords that can generate organic traffic to our website.

A free tool like Google Trends can also provide insight into how people are searching around a particular topic, but that information will be nowhere near what an advanced tool will give you. Still, our guide on using Google Trends for keyword research will definitely come in handy.

Check out the search suggestions (aka autocomplete)

Start typing a query in the search box, but don’t hit Enter. Google will immediately suggest some additional search terms that people have used:
You can repeat this by typing each letter of the alphabet:
Ahrefs will save hours of your time on this kind of research. With Keywords Explorer you’ll get an extensive list based on Google’s search suggestions. Our keyword tool will also automatically populate it with valuable metrics such as the number of searches each term gets as well as its ranking difficulty estimation (we’ll go into more detail on this in a minute):

Get some hints from the related searches

Finally, look at the related searches section (you will find it at the bottom of the search results page):
This is an important place to look at because it will give you some extremely relevant keywords you should target. For example, when we look at the related searches for ‘Dublin hotels’, we can see that people search for things like ‘cheap hotels in Dublin city center’ and ‘bed and breakfast dublin ireland’, which weren’t in our original consideration.

Based on the type of hotel we’re working on and the type of customers it will be targeting, some of these can be a great way to reach our intended audience.

How to expand your keyword list

Search suggestions and related searches will give you a pretty limited number of keyword ideas. This is the part where you can really benefit from using one of the premium keyword research tools on the market.

Ahrefs is built on a database of over 5 billion (yes, with a B) keywords. A simple check with Keywords Explorer using some of the terms I found during my initial research/brainstorming gives me over 4k(!) suggestions to work with:
When you have access to this calibre of data-backed insight, coming up with keyword ideas is no longer a challenge. You should just choose the opportunities to focus on and pursue.

Understand how your target customers are talking about your topic

Google search results can give you a lot to get started with SEO, but it’s in no way enough.

To be successful with SEO, you need to understand how people are talking about the niche you’re operating in, what problems they’re facing, what language they’re using, and so on. Use every opportunity to talk to customers and take notice of the language they’re using.

Doing it in person is great, but also very time-consuming. So here are some places where you can find the words people use while talking about your topic of interest:

Ahrefs Content Explorer

Content Explorer provides one of the quickest and most reliable methods to understand what topics are the most popular and engaging in a certain field.

Here’s what I got when I searched for ‘Ireland travel’:
From the results, I can see that travel guides are very popular. That gives me the idea that we can publish a travel guide on the site and attract visitors and social shares through it.

Social Media, Forums, and Communities

Websites with a lot of user-generated content are a great place to see how people are talking about your chosen topic. Some of the places you can visit to perform this kind of analysis include:

Quora/Reddit:Quora is probably not the first place that will come to mind when you’re looking for travel advice, but you’d be surprised by the amount of information you can find there even on this topic. Where it comes to Reddit, the old adage there’s a subReddit for everything holds true.

Facebook/LinkedIn Groups: Make sure you’re looking in the most relevant place — I won’t be using LinkedIn for my research, but there are plenty of groups on Facebook where I can find a lot of information.

We have a really extensive resource on how to use these communities to generate keyword ideas.

Literally anywhere else

Any website or social network with a large number of visitors and user-generated content can serve as a source of inspiration and keyword ideas.

Podcasts are hugely popular, which means the people that produce them spend considerable time researching topics:
On Amazon you can search for your field of interest and see what books/products are selling well — this serves as a validation that people are interested in this particular topic.Neil Patel has a great idea on how to get even more information out of this. Check out the table of contents of the book and especially the chapter titles for more keyword ideas:

Combining all these methods should give you an extensive list of search terms (or keywords) that you can target with the content on your website.

However, some keywords (especially in a field that’s as competitive as travel) get a lot of searches but are very hard to place well for. Others would be easy to rank for but hardly get any searches. Understanding what keywords to target with your pages and your content is the essential step in achieving SEO success.
Understand the metrics
In keyword research, there are two metrics of the utmost importance:

search volume (representing how many times people search for a certain term) and

keyword difficulty (showing how easy or hard it would be to appear on the first page of search results for that term).

I see way too many SEO experts who still proclaim Google Keyword Planner as a viable tool for predicting keyword traffic. The reality is — it’s NOT a dependable place for this kind of data.

That’s why it’s important to use an advanced tool, which can give you reliable data on keyword search volumes:
The same applies to keyword difficulty. Keyword Planner uses the metric aimed at paid advertising, i.e. how much competition there is for the paid positions for a given term.
Keyword Difficulty in Ahrefs makes it extremely simple to understand the chances of ranking in the top 10 search results by estimating how many domains you need to link to a page with your content (more on the topic of backlinking further in this post).

Understand the intent of each keyword you’re targeting

When you start delving deeper into SEO and keyword research, you’ll realize there are 3 types of searches people make:

Naturally, searches with a high level of commercial interest are more valuable from a business point of view, since the people doing them are much closer to the point of purchase and thus more likely to spend money if they land on your site.

There’s a difference in the intent even between transactional terms. Here’s an example. Which search query is closer to conversion: ‘last minute hotel deals Dublin’ or ‘Dublin hotels’?

To understand the intent behind the search term, make sure you thoroughly review what pages rank for it. Since Google’s main preoccupation is to satisfy its users, the algorithm keeps a close eye on the behavior of people searching for a particular term and tries to offer results that will satisfy the intent of their search. Thus, a search for ‘Dublin guide’ will show a bunch of informational results from Lonely Planet and TripAdvisor:
But once I type ‘Dublin accommodation’ in the search box, it’s a whole different story — the results page is dominated by offers for hotels and b&b’s:

Learn professional keyword research

Keyword research is a huge area of SEO and it can be very intimidating to someone who’s just getting started. However, understanding the basic concepts and metrics is a must for every website owner who wants to drive organic traffic.

To dive deeper into professional keyword research, check out our extensive guide on the topic.

After you figure out the keyword(s) you want to rank for and what searchers are expecting to see when they type them into Google, you also need to designate what page on your site is going to rank for each keyword. Create a map (in a spreadsheet or another file) that ties each keyword in your plan to a page on your site.

Next, you have to make sure this page is structured in a way that search engines understand what topic (i.e. search term) it is targeted at.

Step 2: Creating pages optimized for search

Keyword research is just the first step towards attracting search traffic to your website.

However, you also need to make sure your pages are structured well in order to rank for the keywords you selected and satisfy those who’re searching.

Perform basic on-page optimization

On-page optimization is the next essential step in your basic SEO strategy. Even if you find the most profitable keywords and have the best content for them, your effort would be wasted if your pages are not optimized for search engines.

Before I get into the details of on-page optimization, let’s clear up what tools you need to perform it. There are many ways to implement the features I discuss in the following sections, but if you’re using WordPress for your website, my recommendation is to go with the Yoast SEO plugin. It’s free and simple to use and it’s perfect for someone who’s just starting with on-page SEO.
And now let’s get to the nitty-gritty. Setting up your pages for success with search engine goes through optimizing the following elements:

Content

I’m putting it first because it’s the most important factor for the success of your pages. SEO is becoming extremely competitive and there’s no way to succeed with it (especially if you’re popularizing a new website) without producing extremely high-quality content.

Many people think wrongly that good content = long content. There is an equation that works, but it goes like this:

Good content = content that is useful to the person consuming it.

To put it in more concrete terms, if you want to rank a travel guide on Dublin, what is going to be more useful to your readers — 2000 words explaining the main areas of the city or a map that quickly shows them the most popular attractions and the best areas to go to for food, drink, and entertainment? Word count does not even start to cover what matters when we’re talking about quality.

URL

The web address of your page sends a rather strong signal to search engines about its topic. It’s important that you get it right the first time because you should avoid changing it.

Try to make the URL as short as possible and include the main keyword you want that page to rank for. For example, I would put my Dublin travel guide under domain.com/dublin-guide.

Meta properties

Web pages have two specific features that search engines use when building up search results:

Title

Contrary to what the name suggests, the meta title tag does not appear anywhere on your page. It sets the name of the browser tab displaying your page and is used by Google and other search engines when the page is featured in search results.

The title tag is a great opportunity to write a headline that both

a) includes the keyword you want this page to rank for and
b) is compelling enough to make searchers click on it and visit your site.

Because mobile is becoming increasingly important and there are many different devices we use to browse and search the internet, there isn’t a hard rule on how long titles should be anymore. The most recent research suggests you should still aim to keep yours under 60 characters to make sure they’re fully displayed in search results.

Description

Although Google won’t always show your page description in a search result snippet, it will quite often. So don’t forget to include the keywords you want to rank for in the description section. Notice how Google highlights the search term in each result in the screenshot below.
Make sure your descriptions are under 135 characters long and that they compel searchers to follow the link to your website.

Headers and Subheaders

Use the standard HTML format for headers (H1 to H6) to make it easy for search engines to understand the structure of your page and the importance of each section.

Header 1 should be reserved for the on-page title of your content and should include the main keyword that page is targeting. Make sure you only have one H1 header per page.

Header 2 can be used for the titles of the main sections on your page. They should also include the main keyword you’re targeting (whenever possible) and are also a good place to include additional (longer-tail) keywords you want to rank for with this piece of content.

Every time you’re going a step further in sections, just use the next type of header, e.g. Header 3 for subheadings within an H2 section, and so on. Here’s what a well-structured piece of content should look like when headers are used appropriately:

H1: The Complete First-Time Traveller’s Guide to Dublin

H2: Sights & Attractions

H3: Trinity College

H3: The Guinness Storehouse

H3: The Temple Bar Area

H2: Accommodation

H3: Hotel 1

H3: Hotel 2

H3: Hotel 3

H2: Restaurants

H3: Upscale restaurant

H3: Gastropub

H3: Another hip place

H2: Bars

H3: Bar with live music

H3: Bar with great cocktails

H3: Very touristy bar

Following a clear and exhaustive structure not only makes it easy for search engines to categorize your content, but also helps human readers make sense of your text. They will reward you by spending longer time on your page and coming back to it when they want to learn more about the topic.

Internal linking

Linking between the various pages on your website strategically is a great way to improve the speed at which search engines crawl your website and instruct them about the most important pages on your website.

In our example, we can create a page that targets ‘Dublin guide’ and have it link to separate pages that cover ‘Dublin sights’, ‘Dublin restaurants’, and so on.

Images

While the visual material is a great aid for humans, search engine crawlers are not so great (yet) at making sense of them. To help them, you should use the alt tag to explain what the image is about (and ideally include the keyword you’re targeting with this particular piece of content).

In WordPress this can be achieved easily by using the Alternative Text field in the image editor:
If you’re not using WordPress, you can also add the tag manually:
Apart from optimizing each piece of content you publish, you also have to make sure the basic setup of your website is done in a way that it doesn’t hurt your chances to rank.

Step 3: Making sure your website is well accessible to search engines and visitors

One of the important things to keep in mind when doing SEO is that you’re essentially working for two separate customers — your human readers and the bots search engines use to index your website.

While Google and other search engines have been making strides in developing a human-like understanding for their crawlers, many differences still exist between the two. Therefore, your goal should be to create a positive experience for both human and robot visitors on your website.

If you’re anything like me (i.e. very non-technical), understanding how to work with human customers is the easy(-ish) part. It’s robots that I find it more challenging to appease. That’s why, while it’s definitely important to have a strong understanding of the features we discuss in the following paragraphs, I would always encourage you strongly to delegate them to a professional (preferably a developer), who knows how to implement them for your website.

These are the technical elements you need to keep an eye on.

Optimize your website’s loading speed

Both humans and search engine bots prioritize the loading speed of websites. Studies suggest that up to 40% of people leave websites that take longer than 3 seconds to load.

Using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool or GTMetrix not only can help you find out how quickly your site loads, but will also give you actionable advice on how to further improve the speed of your pages:

Create a sitemap and a robots.txt file

These two items are aimed solely at helping search engines make sense of your website.

Sitemaps

A sitemap is a file published in a special format called XML, which allows search engines to find all the pages that exist on your website and understand how they’re connected (i.e. see the overall structure of your website).

Sitemaps do not affect rankings directly, but they allow search engines to find and index new pages on your website faster.

Robots.txt

While the sitemap lays out the full structure of your website, the Robots.txt file gives specific instructions to the search engine crawlers on which parts of the website they should and shouldn’t index.

It is important to have a Robots.txt file for your website because search engine allocate a crawl budget to their bots — a number of pages they’re allowed to crawl with each visit.

All major search engine crawlers and other “good” bots recognize and obey the Robots.txt format.

Website architecture matters

The structure of the data on your website also plays a major role in successful SEO performance.

Google takes into account factors such as how long people stay on your website, how many pages they view per visit, how high the bounce rate (single page visits) is, etc. when making decisions on how high to rank your website in search results. Therefore, having a clear structure and navigation not only helps visitors find their way around with ease but will also signal to Google that your site is worth ranking.

In general, setting these features in the right way involves a fair amount of technical knowledge, so you might want to consider hiring a professional to do them for you.

Step 4: Building backlinks from other websites

As a website owner, you’ve got full control of the keywords to target, on-page optimization, and site structure.

However, there’s a part of SEO, which you can’t manage directly, but is essential for your performance — how many websites link back to your page.

Backlinks are among the most important ranking factors

There’s clear evidence showing that external links are one of the factors with the strongest influence on Google’s ranking algorithm.
Our study of 2 million keywords discovered that the number and authority of the pages and domains linking back to a website are the strongest predictor of ranking success.

Here are the most important things you need to know about building backlinks.

Not all links are created equal

In the past, many SEO experts were heavily focused on getting as many links as possible without considering whether the pages were logically related. This gave rise to various forms of abuse such as link farming, buying links, etc.

Over the last few years Google has introduced a number of changes to penalize such practices, so now the quality of the backlinks is much more important than the quantity. Link quality comes down to a number of factors:

Authority of the page and the website

The authority of the site and the page that link to your website has an effect on how valuable that link is. Getting a mention and a link from TripAdvisor’s blog would count for more than a review on a small travel blog. That is because search engines know that TripAdvisor is an authoritative website on travel since there are thousands of other websites that link to it.

In the same way, the page where your link is published also carries its own authority. For example, getting a link from TripAdvisor’s main page for Dublin — which gets thousands of links and visitors itself — is better than having tons of mentions of your hotel on page 66 in forum threads.

At Ahrefs, we use the Domain Rating and URL Rating metrics to help users understand how valuable each backlink opportunity is. You can run any page through Site Explorer to review its stats. Here’s what we get for TripAdvisor’s main page on Dublin:

Dofollow vs. Nofollow links

When placing a link on your website, you can instruct search engine bots whether they should treat it as an endorsement of the page you’re linking to or not. That’s controlled by the optional a rel=nofollow attribute:

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Link text</a>

By default, a hyperlink is “dofollow” (i.e. you do not need to add rel=dofollow to your links as this attribute doesn’t even exist). This signals that you endorse the link and want to pass “link juice” to it. Adding the nofollow attribute instructs search engine crawlers that they shouldn’t follow the link.

Websites sometime use the rel=nofollow tag as a way to prevent abuse. For example, you’d often find pages that automatically add rel=nofollow to links placed in the comments section of the website.

How to build links

Link building is critical for the success of your SEO strategy, so if you’re prepared to spend resources (time, money, etc.) on producing content, you should also be prepared to commit at least as much time promoting and generating links to your content.

There are many tactics you can use to get other websites to link back to your page. Some are more legitimate than others. However, before you start cherry picking “link building hacks” to try, take the time to review and analyze your competition.

Each niche is different and tactics that work great in one might not be so effective in yours. Therefore, the best thing you can do is to analyze how your competitors are building links and look for patterns.

When you’re done with this, consider some of the following popular tactics.

Identifying opportunities + Email outreach

The first step in your approach should be to find authoritative websites that would be a good fit for linking back to your content (essentially, a combination of high authority and relevance).

Let’s say we decide to go ahead with the idea to publish a Dublin travel guide. We produce a high-quality piece of content and want to build links to it. First, we’ll check out what pages already rank for the keyword we’re going to target.
Here’s a page offering a bit of information, but I would not call it spectacular:
We can use Ahrefs to check what websites link to this page:
As I check the results, I quickly find a good candidate I’d love to get a backlink from:
The name and email of the website owner are available in plain sight, so now I can reach out to them, using a good email script, and suggest them to check out your high-quality piece of content.

Guest blogging

Many people think guest blogging is dead because this year Google published a “warning” about guest posting for link building.

“Google does not discourage these types of articles in the cases when they inform users, educate another site’s audience or bring awareness to your cause or company. However, what does violate Google’s guidelines on link schemes is when the main intent is to build links in a large-scale way back to the author’s site.”

I can remind myself the very first days I heard about Search Engine Optimization. I was eager to learn it and found every single “SEO Guide“ on the internet, wonderfully informative and useful. But unfortunately I couldn’t find somethings easily the, or I should say, something to the point for beginners. Those were quite confusing […]

I can remind myself the very first days I heard about Search Engine Optimization. I was eager to learn it and found every single “SEO Guide“ on the internet, wonderfully informative and useful.

But unfortunately I couldn’t find somethings easily the, or I should say, something to the point for beginners.

Those were quite confusing days for me…

So from that day, I decided to write a compact SEO Guide for the newbies in this field.

Well, guys! If you are a new one with confused concepts of SEO just like I use to be, in the beginning…

Then, just sit back and relax as your confusions are going to vanish.

After reading this article, you will have a clear sense of all necessary things and a path to move on, on your SEO journey.

And I am sure, you’re gonna love it.

Before starting, let me give you a Golden Tip to understand anything in an efficient way, especially when you are trying to learn something for the first time.

“While reading an article, like this one, do not de-track yourself by starting thinking deep about any sub-topic. Just try to walk with the writer in your first read and only pay attention to

Just try to walk with the writer in your first read and only pay attention to What the Writer Want to Say. Questions like

Questions like WHY and HOW comes later”.

Hope you are 100% ready now! So, Let’s move on…

Starting with our SEO Guide

As already described, the purpose of this SEO Guide is to give a perfect understanding of Search Engine Optimization to the beginners. So, I did a bit research work and dig out some critical questions which must be answered.

So, I did a bit research work and dig out some critical questions which must be answered.

Let’s start with the first and the most important question.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO is a combination of strategies used to increase a website’s visibility and ranking in search engines. You can say, it is a way in which the webmasters inform the search engines about the quality of their websites, to drive more organic (non-paid) traffic by improved ranking in search engine result pages.

You can say, it is a way in which the webmasters inform the search engines about the quality of their websites, to drive more organic (non-paid) traffic by improved ranking in search engine result pages.

It mainly depends on the content, structure, and links to a website. We just need to develop these things in a way, a search engine can understand better.

But remember! While doing SEO to make our site search engine friendly, we should never ever forget the concerns of our viewers. We are definitely doing it for the best user experience.

Up to this point, you can ask any question if you have…

Okay! That was just an expression, and I hope your concept about SEO is a little bit clear now.

So, let’s move on with our SEO Guide to know more.

Here is the next question, you should ask yourself…

Why Do I Need To Do SEO Of My Website?

Let’s recall our previous concept of SEO! We are doing it to improve our site’s visibility in search engine results.

And here is Why:

Search engines are the biggest and best sources of web traffic. You may already know the major ones, which are:

For sure, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, etc. can also generate a bunch of visitors to your website. But when it comes to the primary source, it’s always a search engine.

I can relate to some my friends who still use google search bar to reach Facebook.

And also, a newbie will always open google to browse anything. Same stands true for regular internet users, whenever they wanna search anything like an article content, any type of services, products or even any information.

Another big reason which is making the search engines unique is that they provide highly targeted traffic. We’ll get people on our website who are looking for what exactly we are offering.

Search engines will do that on their own if we have done our website’s SEO.

But if we don’t do that, search engines might not be able to find our site. In short, we’ll not be getting any traffic.

Users’ search queries are the words that users type into the search bar for finding anything.

And these are critical.

If we are not doing proper SEO by ignoring search queries, our websites will get ignored by search engines as well.

Targeted traffic means increased exposure and revenue. So don’t hesitate to invest in SEO, if you want to get an excellent rate of return as compared to any other marketing option.

What If I Don’t Do SEO Of My Website?

Here you must be thinking:

“Oh Man! Isn’t it the same question like the previous one? And you just told, No SEO means No Traffic From Search Engines!”

Yes! You are right…

But I want you to take a bit special insight of this question as well. And, I am sure you won’t mind reading this interesting information.

Once your website is live, search engines will crawl it to find out what’s it about. Now if a user searches for a topic related to your site, search engines will show it in its result pages.

Search engines are brilliant and continually improving their technology to crawl a website more efficiently.

But still, they have limitations in their operation.

Search engines are brilliant and continually improving their technology to crawl a website more efficiently. But still, they have limitations in their operation.

This is precisely where SEO comes into action. SEO helps the search engines to know more about a website’s relevancy and some other factors, which they can’t do themselves.

Rightly done SEO can give you thousands of viewers while some wrong moves can disappear your website from top search engine result pages leaving you with almost zero traffic.

SEO not only serves the purpose to make your site’s content available to search engines but also improves your website’s ranking by placing it higher in the search results. And hence, more searchers will find your source quickly.

Competition is constantly on the rise and, the ones who do SEO of their platforms will surely have a distinct advantage in case of traffic and viewers.

I hope that the concepts are clearer now.

Let’s move to the next question in our SEO Guide.

Can I Do SEO?

No doubt SEO is a little bit complicated, but not that much if can keep track!

The basics are easily understandable, and your way to do that can make a big difference. The Internet is full of free resources to learn it, including this wonder SEO Guide.

Just learn then add some practice, and you are ready to go expert in that niche…!

If your website is complex and you are not willing to learn and implement each and everything, you can seek the help from experts to take care of the things for you.

A firm like SeoTopBox can help.

But remember: Having a sound knowledge of the core concepts of SEO is a must…!

I think it’s enough now if someone asks you “What is SEO?”

Now let’s take a look at the structure of SEO Guide. The next section is about practical information and will be very useful to make your base about actually doing SEO.

How Google Works

Black Hat V/s White Hat

Before diving into the field of SEO, you should be aware of White Hat and Black Hat SEO. Here is how these may be described…

Black Vs White Hat SEO

Just remember we will always focus on white hat SEO. We are not going into the details of comparison in this guide. So, in case you wanna know, you can find more here.

That was all about basics. Hope you’ve got everything because I have added almost everything.

Before moving on further, below are the major divisions of SEO:

Keyword Research

On Page SEO

Off Page SEO

#1 Keyword Research

Almost all of the beginner’s guides to SEO on the internet are ignoring this factor. But according to me, it is the most important one.

SEO is a game of Keywords.

So I decided to give you a solid introduction to “What Is Keyword Research?” and “Why It Is That Much Important?”.

In an earlier part of this SEO Guide, I have talked about the user’s search queries. These exact wordings of a user are called keywords.

You must be aware of the keywords related to your topic or niche if you want to be successful in SEO. Different keywords have different value depending on their search volume and some other factors. In this SEO Guide, we don’t need to go deep into these factors.

Different keywords have different value depending on their search volume and some other factors. In this SEO Guide, we don’t need to go deep into these factors.

Keyword Research is all about finding the intentions of the users to use search engines. What exactly the users are searching for your topic, are your keywords.

Using the right keywords while doing SEO of your website, is the career deciding thing for your site. It gives you an opportunity to know your targeted audience in a better way. It will increase your site’s relevancy to your topic, and that is a great thing for SEO and search engines.

It will increase your site’s relevancy to your topic, and that is a great thing for SEO and search engines.

You need to do proper research to find valuable keywords related to your topic before starting your website. Even if you already have a website and content on it, you can optimize it by using correct keywords.

Even if you already have a website and content on it, you can optimize it by using correct keywords.

For now, if you want to know more about how to do keyword research to find valuable keywords, you can check out these cool guides for details….

By the way, SeoTopBox comprehensive guide for proper Keyword Research is posted. You can read now.

Now moving to the next step!

On Page SEO

On Page means everything displayed on the web page and its back end programming. In On Page SEO, you need to optimize your website’s page and posts, etc. for search engines.

In Short “Optimizing Content for Search Engine!”.

Courtesy of Backlinko

It covers a lot of things, so let’s break this into larger branches.

1. Content

Content is the biggest division of On Page SEO. You might have heard that famous quote about content that:

“Content is the King, ” and there is no place for doubt about that.

Content is the King

Do you know that Google is the biggest search engine! I mean sure you do, and no one even needs to ask that… Google’s first priority is to provide its users with top quality content, and with best relevant information available on the web.

These days Google also loves the right length of content. So, try to write long and informative.

Content on your website isn’t only about the written article. It also includes videos, pictures, animated slides, and infographics, etc.

Try to make it for the best user experience and perfectly optimized for the search engines at the same time. It will increase your user’s probability to share it more and more.

Pay more attention to for better content:

Titles – Create eye-catching titles that raise the reader’s interest. You only have one chance to make a great first impression.

Keywords – Pick keywords that will help bring people to your site and are relevant.

Links – Link to quality sites that compliment what your website is about. It’ll encourage sites in your niche to link to you as well.

Quality – Try to publish unique and quality content. This prompts users to come to your site because they cannot easily find the content elsewhere.

Freshness – If you are publishing content that does not age or becomes outdated, that’s great, but you also need to add new content on a regular basis. If you don’t have the time to add content to your website, consider adding a question and answer section or a blog to your site.

While writing your content, don’t ever forget to embed your keyword research in the best possible and natural looking way.

For now, You can read some content writing guides to know more…

While SeoTopBox content writing a guide with effective tips, tricks, secret strategies and specific step by step process, is on the way as well.

2. Website Layout

After optimizing your content, Website Layout is the next thing you need to take care of while doing On Page SEO.

An example of the worst website layout is when someone has totally irrelevant categories as compared to their topic.

I have personally seen some sites which have layouts like, their niche is health and they got categories related to fashion designing. So, don’t ever do that serious harm to your SEO.

This thing just greatly disturbs and distracts the user…

Can you just imagine visiting a website with a bad layout, there are more than 80% chances that you won’t like to visit that site again….

So, Why would anyone else!

Then, why not making it user-friendly! And sure, Google love that as well.

3. Website Speed

When a user searches for something and your website appears on search engine result page (SERP).

Then that user opens your site. Dwell time is the duration for how long that user stays on your site after clicking on it.

And that Dwell time is indeed an important search engine ranking factor.

Source: Ahrefs

Now let’s work on an example to see what happens to that Dwell time when a website has slow loading speed…

How about taking an example of yourself? Let’s say you search something and then open the top site appearing in the search results.

What if that website is taking too long to open! What would you do? Wait…! No way. You will close the tab and move to the second site…

And here is how Dwell time of the first website gets destroyed. Results…! Ranking down.

In short, a user needs good speed, and Google also has an update for website speed. So, try to improve your site to increase its Dwell time and hence improving its ranking in SERPs.

4. Website Design

Website design is another critical thing to have good user experience… Your theme needs to be Responsive and should have an Eye Catching Design.

I would always prefer to stay on a website with an attractive design along with informative content. I can also read from a poorly designed website but only when it is the only result I have…

There are lots of sites which have excellent content but actually a bad design.

Just ask yourself! How long can you keep visiting these type of sites, which are even worse when you are using your smartphone…

You’ll surely get tired and at the end, will stop visiting that site…

Personal Experience!

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

So I would say again, always use Responsive and Eye Catching Design.

For now, that’s enough about On Page SEO. And here you can find our guide to getting you on page done with detailed understanding.

#2 Off Page SEO

Just like you have done your On-Page SEO, you also need to do Off-Page SEO to make your domain authority in the eyes of search engines.

In other words, I can say we need to make our website trustworthy for search engines.

And it will happen when other famous sites tell the search engine that our site has the best content about our topic.

Now, how would it happen…?

We need to get our website referred from other famous resources on the web about our niche. In technical terms, it is called link building.

Naturally, it’s an automatic thing. We will post very high-quality content on our website and share it with topically interested people and internet marketing resources.

Eventually, whoever would like our resource will link to it.

The best link building strategy is to create something awesome and let everyone know about it.

But Remember: In today’s competitive environment, we need to learn about proper link building strategies. Then plan and execute pre-defined and practical ways adopted by some quality sites.

And your hard work in that activity will surely pay you with better ranking in SERPs.

Just to know, here are the things which should be done:

Use social network to promote your content

Do some blogging and guest posting

Refer your suggested solutions in discussion forums

Photo and video sharing

Relevant business and local listing

Next heading might be a bit annoying, but trust me it is critical information for all of us…

How Link Looks Like and How To Get Them?

Start Tag of The Link

It’s a signal for search engine about the beginning of a relationship. It is like, Hey! Next information is the link to something which should be followed. It is called “Anchor Text.”

Link Referral Location: It is the information for search engine about the site, where a link is pointing. Referral site can be a web page, a picture, a downloadable file or a video, etc. You can also keep the reference location, a particular point on the same page you are visiting means another section of a single page.

Visible/Anchor Text of Link: Sometimes, you might have seen blue colored, bold or underlined text which is clickable. When you click on it, you move to another web page about that particular word. These are also links, called anchor text.

Link Tag Closure: Just like the name of the tag is suggesting, it is a signal indicating the end of a link to the search engine.

You will need above information once you are making links practically.

On average, the higher up page 1 the result is, the greater the number of linking domains that the webpage has.

Okay now! We have had a view of some connection parameters. Let’s move on to know the ways which can be used to get links.

Develop Quality Content: Developing quality content is the best way to get links automatically. Have you seen that I have mentioned some article and guides in this SEO guide? I have done this to help you out with some very useful information through these links. Yup! These are links, which I have given to these sites. Why I did that? Because these articles have excellent content with in-depth details. And it might be possible that this guide of mine would get some automatic links. It is a little difficult thing, but if you choose to work on your passion related niche, I can assure you that your content can stand out of the crowd.

Guest Posting: There are blogs which accept to publish your unique and informative posts. They will link to your site, once you are allowed to post on these platforms. But, you need to work hard to get the approval from high authority blogs. You will get a ranking boost by publishing on these high authority blogs. I am repeating that your content quality matters a lot when applying for guest posting.

Blog Commenting: Finally, an incredibly easy way to get some quality links. But still, a little comment approving game is on. Reach out the free blogs related to your niche, read the articles and do some attention seeking comments like you can ask something which is not entirely clear to you. Be a little smart, and you will get the job done.

Get Some Links From “Wikipedia”: Search your niche on Wikipedia, go to edit, update the content if you have new and proven information and then link to your site. A link to Wikipedia is way better than links from high authority sites. But remember, you need to maintain limits. Otherwise, search engines will consider these links spam.

Social Bookmarking: Have you established a vast social network? If yes! Then it is awesome. Mention your website in your social profiles. This is called social bookmarking. Great way to get links.

I think, your concepts have been modified. Aren’t you feeling updated about off page SEO…

SEO Ranking Factors

Here is another neat trick:

Social Sharing is a Ranking Booster

Let’s say that you are all settled up with your website and about to publish your very first and excellent content. Would it start getting instantly from the search engine? No Way!

So, What’s the solution to keep away from sudden disappointment? Yes! Establish your social network and give some shares to your newly published content.

This will give you instant traffic and sure a ranking boost as well…

Okay, Guys, I am done with my guide…! Isn’t it what you are thinking right now?

Actually, SeoTopBox doesn’t think that way.

We have seen a lot of guides not doing a proper wrap-up…

So, we have decided to help you out about what to do next or where to go now. It is our bonus:

Your Way Forward

Now that you have understood SEO Guide, and some of you might be thinking that I have missed a lot of information about SEO as not all the beginners only will read this guide.

Making it clear, yes I did that on purpose.

Why?

I could have written about 50000 words on this topic making a lengthy chapter wise and very in depth guide. But, trust me, that would have been annoying and distracting for the beginners.

And also, there are lots of those lengthy guides available on the web. Then why do I need to add another one…

The purpose is to get a clear idea from this guide, then learn updated about each subheading, not the outdated lengthy guides.

How To Do SEO?

In your way forward you need to follow these steps:

Select your niche (always start with your passion)

Do keyword research and content planning

Set up your platform/website

Develop content with a bit deeper keyword research

Setup your social network

Post content and on-page optimization

Make your content commercial with social sharing

Start off-page optimization

Analyze your performance

Plan improvements and go back to step 3

You may skip step 4 in your second round

While doing all these things, keep on learning and improving. Exploring each subheading, you will find some new, website’s authority and ranking parameters defined by SEO experts.

Let’s not beat around the bush here. Irrespective of what some professionals may claim, search engine rankings are still the best indicators of SEO progress. Sure, on their own, they’re nothing more than a means to an end – increasing online visibility, getting more sales or achieving any other outcome you want for your business. […]

The thing is, given the plethora of choices, how do you choose the best keyword ranking tool?

Well, that’s what I intended to find out. I decided to compare some of the popular rank trackers in the market – Moz, RankRanger, SEMrush, SE Ranking, and Ahrefs – to establish which offers the best value.

Without any further ado, here’s what I discovered.

Comparison criteria:

Here’s the functionality I took into consideration when comparing rank trackers.

How many search engines and devices does each tool track

How many keywords could I monitor

Can I track rankings by location (and how many locations could I specify)

Can I track rankings for my business name in local listings

Can I compare my rankings with the competition

Could the tool suggest additional competitors for me

Can I see which keywords trigger a featured snippet

How often do they update the data

Can a tool alert me of unusual ranking fluctuations

What sort of reports can I generate

I know there’s a lot to cover so let’s dive right in.

Comparison Results

#1. Search Engines and Devices

Search Engines

It goes without saying that we are all eager to know how our sites rank on Google.

But depending on various factors, like your location or business type, for example, you might want to track the rankings on other search engines as well.

And as it turns out, rank trackers differ greatly when it comes to search engines they target.

For example, Moz allows you to track rankings on Google, Google Mobile, Bing and Yahoo.

However, the problem is, RankRanger allows you to pick only two search engines from the list. And so, although you have a plethora of choice, you can’t avail the options in full.

Verdict: If you look at the list of supported engines, RankRanger is miles ahead of the rest. Unfortunately, its restriction to two sources lands it in line with other tools.

Devices

All rank trackers allow monitoring rankings for desktop and mobile devices separately. However, SEMrush is the only one that splits mobile devices between smartphones and tablets, offering a more in-depth look at your mobile rankings.

Verdict:SEMrush for offering a more detailed analysis of mobile rankings.

#2. Keywords

Depending on the size of your site, and the business, you might want to track anything from a handful of keywords to thousands or more.

And particularly, if you’re in the latter category, it is crucial that the rank tracker you choose will not force you to drop some of the data.

Here’s how my selected rank trackers stack up regarding the number of keywords they allow you to track:

(Note: I’m quoting official information from those companies here, covering various price plans these products offer)

SEMrush

Moz

Ahrefs

SE Ranking

RankRanger

From 500 to 5000

From 300 to 7500

From 300 to 10000

From 50 to 20000

From 350 to 2000

Verdict: A tricky choice as the best tool in this case largely depends on your business requirements.

So, instead of offering a strict verdict, I thought I’d compare the cost per keyword for each tool (using their smallest paid plan).

And so, as part of the comparison, I checked which rank trackers report on featured snippets in rankings.

And this is where things get really tricky. Because all the tools show the featured snippet icon, denoting that a particular keyword fires off the Answer Box. Then some of them allow to dig deeper and filter results by this rank type.

So to take it from the top, Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush and RankRanger denote featured snippet in ranking reports, allowing you to identify keywords that trigger the answer box.

The cool thing about SEMrush featured snippet report is that it is unique in the market. It significantly speeds up your workflow of getting into featured snippets in two ways: result analysis and opportunities search.

First, based on your keyword list, you get the list of all your pages that got you to featured snippet for any location or device that you target.

At the same time, in the other tab, you get all the keywords that you did not gain a featured snippet rank for, but your competitors did. In the table, you can see at once the keywords AND the specific URL from the snippet. This feature allows you to quickly analyze why a particular page gained on the FS ranking and therefore how to improve your own page. Also, by putting priorities to your pages that got to the top-20 SERP positions, it’s easy to strategically plan your work.

RankRanger provides a dedicated featured snippet report as well, including the information about keywords, domains, and landing pages that trigger the answer box.

Verdict: A tie between RankRanger and SEMrush

#8. Data Update Frequency

Given how fast rankings can change, it is crucial that you have access to the most current data.

Spotting unusual rankings fluctuation might help you identify and overcome a bigger issue if the problem was left unattended.

For that reason alone, I prefer an instant data update, rather than a delayed one. And so, as part of the process, I checked the intervals at which I could have my data delivered by the rank trackers.

But to my surprise, there are huge discrepancies with data update frequency between those products.

SE Ranking, SEMrush and RankRanger provide daily rankings.

From SEMrush’s website:

RankRanger

Moz reports on your search positions only once a week.

SE Ranking, on the other hand, allows you to specify your desired frequency, and choose to receive the data every day, once in 3 days or weekly. Note that the frequency you choose will affect your price, with daily reports costing you more, and weekly slashing your cost by as much as 40%.

Verdict: RankRanger provides the best value for the money here. But it’s worth mentioning that SE Ranking allows to select the frequency on all plans, and customize it to your needs.

#9. Alerts

In case something unusual happens to the rankings one would like to know the cause behind it, identify the problem in detail and take adequate measures to eradicate the problem.

Unfortunately, the only rank tracker that offers the ability to set up alerts, and receive emails when rankings change is SEMrush.

That said, I admit that this is hands down an incredible feature, allowing SEOs to become more proactive, rather than reactive to changes and potential issues with rankings.

Verdict: SEMrush, undoubtedly.

Note: This is a different functionality from weekly (or daily, monthly, etc.) ranking update reports that most tools offer.

#10. Reports

It doesn’t matter if you’re an in-house SEO or work for an agency, at some point you’ll have to issue reports to prove your work. Although agency folk might do it more often, it’s a feature we all need.

Most of the rank trackers I compared offer the ability to create PDF reports. The only exception in the list is Ahrefs. It does not offer any reporting functionality.

With others, however, there are some differences regarding the type of reports you can create.

SEMrush allows to create a standard PDF report that you can schedule to receive regularly.

You can also customize the look and content of the PDF, adding data from other SEMrush tools with a simple drag and drop interface.

Many of those elements allow you to bring in custom data and reports created specifically for this report, making it an invaluable tool for marketers and agencies that need to provide more context for the ranking report.

Closing Thoughts

As SEOs, we all have different objectives – increasing overall rankings, showing up in the Answer Box, boosting local presence among others. However, the rankings, like I said, are the best indicators of SEO progress.

And we need to use a tool offering functionality that can help us achieve it.

I hope this detailed comparison helps you identify the most effective tool to reach your own SEO goals.

Disclaimers:

First, I signed up for and used demo trials of each tool. As a result, there is a possibility that certain functionality I may highlight as lacking in a particular app was simply blocked in the trial version.

Second, the results of this comparison are entirely subjective and based on my expectations for a rank tracker.

]]>https://seotopbox.com/seo-tools-best-position-trackers-seo-tools-with-results/feed/01628SEO Ranking Factors & Correlation: What Does It Mean When a Metric Is Correlated with Google Rankings?https://seotopbox.com/seo-ranking-factors-correlation-what-does-it-mean-when-a-metric-is-correlated-with-google-rankings/
https://seotopbox.com/seo-ranking-factors-correlation-what-does-it-mean-when-a-metric-is-correlated-with-google-rankings/#respondTue, 09 Jan 2018 05:00:46 +0000https://seotopbox.com/?p=1626

In an industry where knowing exactly how to get ranked on Google is murky at best, SEO ranking factors studies can be incredibly alluring. But there’s danger in believing every correlation you read, and wisdom in looking at it with a critical eye. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the myths and realities of correlations, […]

In an industry where knowing exactly how to get ranked on Google is murky at best, SEO ranking factors studies can be incredibly alluring. But there’s danger in believing every correlation you read, and wisdom in looking at it with a critical eye. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the myths and realities of correlations, then shares a few smart ways to use and understand the data at hand.

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are chatting about SEO ranking factors and the challenge around understanding correlation, what correlation means when it comes to SEO factors.

So you have likely seen, over the course of your career in the SEO world, lots of studies like this. They’re usually called something like ranking factors or ranking elements study or the 2017 ranking factors, and a number of companies put them out. Years ago, Moz started to do this work with correlation stuff, and now many, many companies put these out. So people from Searchmetrics and I think Ahrefs puts something out, and SEMrush puts one out, and of course Moz has one.

These usually follow a pretty similar format, which is they take a large number of search results from Google, from a specific country or sometimes from multiple countries, and they’ll say, “We analyzed 100,000 or 50,000 Google search results, and in our set of results, we looked at the following ranking factors to see how well correlated they were with higher rankings.” That is to say how much they predicted that, on average, a page with this factor would outrank a page without the factor, or a page with more of this factor would outrank a page with less of this factor.

Correlation in SEO studies like these usually mean:

So, basically, in an SEO study, they usually mean something like this. They do like a scatter plot. They don’t have to specifically do a scatter plot, but visualization of the results. Then they’ll say, “Okay, linking root domains had better correlation or correlation with higher organic rankings than the 10 blue link-style results to the degree of 0.39.” They’ll usually use either Spearman or Pearson correlation. We won’t get into that here. It doesn’t matter too much.

Across this many searches, the metric predicted higher or lower rankings with this level of consistency. 1.0, by the way, would be perfect correlation. So, for example, if you were looking at days that end in Y and days that follow each other, well, there’s a perfect correlation because every day’s name ends in Y, at least in English.

So search visits, let’s walk down this path just a little bit. So search visits, saying that that 0.47 correlated with higher rankings, if that sounds misleading to you, it sounds misleading to me too. The problem here is that’s not necessarily a ranking factor. At least I don’t think it is. I don’t think that the more visits you get from search from Google, the higher Google ranks you. I think it’s probably that the correlation runs the other way around — the higher you rank in search results, the more visits on average you get from Google search.

So these ranking factors, I’ll run through a bunch of these myths, but these ranking factors may not be factors at all. They’re just metrics or elements where the study has looked at the correlation and is trying to show you the relationship on average. But you have to understand and intuit this information properly, otherwise you can be very misled.

Myths and realities of correlation in SEO

So let’s walk through a few of these.

1. Correlation doesn’t tell us which way the connection runs.

So it does not say whether factor X influences the rankings or whether higher rankings influences factor X. Let’s take another example — number of Facebook shares. Could it be the case that search results that rank higher in Google oftentimes get people sharing them more on Facebook because they’ve been seen by more people who searched for them? I think that’s totally possible. I don’t know whether it’s the case. We can’t prove it right here and now, but we can certainly say, “You know what? This number does not necessarily mean that Facebook shares influence Google results.” It could be the case that Google results influence Facebook searches. It could be the case that there’s a third factor that’s causing both of them. Or it could be the case that there’s, in fact, no relationship and this is merely a coincidental result, probably unlikely given that there is some relationship there, but possible.

2. Correlation does not imply causation.

This is a famous quote, but let’s continue with the famous quote. But it sure is a hint. It sure is a hint. That’s exactly what we like to use correlation for is as a hint of things we might investigate further. We’ll talk about that in a second.

3. In an algorithm like Google’s, with thousands of potential ranking inputs, if you see any single metric at 0.1 or higher, I tend to think that, in general, that is an interesting result.

Not prove something, not means that there’s a direct correlation, just it is interesting. It’s worthy of further exploration. It’s worthy of understanding. It’s worthy of forming hypotheses and then trying to prove those wrong. It is interesting.

4. Correlation does tell us what more successful pages and sites do that less successful sites and pages don’t do.

Sometimes, in my opinion, that is just as interesting as what is actually causing rankings in Google. So you might say, “Oh, this doesn’t prove anything.” What it proves to me is pages that are getting more Facebook shares tend to do a good bit better than pages that are not getting as many Facebook shares.

I don’t really care, to be honest, whether that is a direct Google ranking factor or whether that’s just something that’s happening. If it’s happening in my space, if it’s happening in the world of SERPs that I care about, that is useful information for me to know and information that I should be applying, because it suggests that my competitors are doing this and that if I don’t do it, I probably won’t be as successful, or I may not be as successful as the ones who are. Certainly, I want to understand how they’re doing it and why they’re doing it.

5. None of these studies that I have ever seen so far have looked specifically at SERP features.

So one of the things that you have to remember, when you’re looking at these, is think organic, 10 blue link-style results. We’re not talking about AdWords, the paid results. We’re not talking about Knowledge Graph or featured snippets or image results or video results or any of these other, the news boxes, the Twitter results, anything else that goes in there. So this is kind of old-school, classic organic SEO.

6. Correlation is not a best practice.

So it does not mean that because this list descends and goes down in this order that those are the things you should do in that particular order. Don’t use this as a roadmap.

7. Low correlation does not mean that a metric or a tactic doesn’t work

Example, a high percent of sites using a page or a tactic will result in a very low correlation. So, for example, when we first did this study in I think it was 2005 that Moz ran its first one of these, maybe it was ’07, we saw that keyword use in the title element was strongly correlated. I think it was probably around 0.2, 0.15, something like that. Then over time, it’s gone way, way down. Now, it’s something like 0.03, extremely small, infinitesimally small.

What does that mean? Well, it could mean one of two things. It could mean Google is using it less as a ranking factor. It could mean that it was never connected, and it’s just total speculation, total coincidence. Or three, it could mean that a lot more people who rank in the top 20 or 30 results, which is what these studies usually look at, top 10 to top 50 sometimes, a lot more of them are putting the keyword in the title, and therefore, there’s just no difference between result number 31 and result number 1, because they both have them in the title. So you’re seeing a much lower correlation between pages that don’t have them and do have them and higher rankings. So be careful about how you intuit that.

Oh, one final note. I did put -0.02 here. A negative correlation means that as you see less of this thing, you tend to see higher rankings. Again, unless there is a strong negative correlation, I tend to watch out for these, or I tend to not pay too much attention. For example, the keyword in the meta description, it could just be that, well, it turns out pretty much everyone has the keyword in the meta description now, so this is just not a big differentiating factor.

What is correlation good for?

All right. What’s correlation actually good for? We talked about a bunch of myths, ways not to use it.

A. IDing the elements that more successful pages tend to have

So if I look across a correlation and I see that lots of pages are twice as likely to have X and rank highly as the ones that don’t rank highly, well, that is a good piece of data for me.

B. Watching elements over time to see if they rise or lower in correlation.

For example, we watch links very closely over time to see if they rise or lower so that we can say: “Gosh, does it look like links are getting more or less influential in Google’s rankings? Are they more or less correlated than they were last year or two years ago?” And if we see that drop dramatically, we might intuit, “Hey, we should test the power of links again. Time for another experiment to see if links still move the needle, or if they’re becoming less powerful, or if it’s merely that the correlation is dropping.”

C. Comparing sets of search results against one another we can identify unique attributes that might be true

So, for example, in a vertical like news, we might see that domain authority is much more important than it is in fitness, where smaller sites potentially have much more opportunity or dominate. Or we might see that something like https is not a great way to stand out in news, because everybody has it, but in fitness, it is a way to stand out and, in fact, the folks who do have it tend to do much better. Maybe they’ve invested more in their sites.

D. Judging metrics as a predictive ranking ability

Essentially, when I’m looking at a metric like domain authority, how good is that at telling me on average how much better one domain will rank in Google versus another? I can see that this number is a good indication of that. If that number goes down, domain authority is less predictive, less sort of useful for me. If it goes up, it’s more useful. I did this a couple years ago with Alexa Rank and SimilarWeb, looking at traffic metrics and which ones are best correlated with actual traffic, and found Alexa Rank is awful and SimilarWeb is quite excellent. So there you go.

E. Finding elements to test

So if I see that large images embedded on a page that’s already ranking on page 1 of search results has a 0.61 correlation with the image from that page ranking in the image results in the first few, wow, that’s really interesting. You know what? I’m going to go test that and take big images and embed them on my pages that are ranking and see if I can get the image results that I care about. That’s great information for testing.

This is all stuff that correlation is useful for. Correlation in SEO, especially when it comes to ranking factors or ranking elements, can be very misleading. I hope that this will help you to better understand how to use and not use that data.

Thanks. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

However, does this hold true for the digital world and your website? And more specifically, what about Google?

In most organizations, organic search optimization becomes a layer that is applied after the fact. After the brand teams, product owners and tech teams have decided what a website’s architecture should be.

However, what if I were to tell you that if search were a primary driver in your site’s architecture you could see a 200%+ performance gain out of your organic channel (and paid quality scores if you drive paid to organic pages), along with meeting brand guidelines and tech requirements?

A logical user experience that both your audience and Google can understand

When search strategy is aligned with your architecture you gain important relevancy signals that Google needs to understand your website.

You position yourself to acquire volume and market share that you would otherwise lose out on. In addition, you will be poised for organic site links within Google, answer box results and local map pack acquisition.

Imagine opening a 1,000-page hardcover book and looking for the table of contents, only to find it is either missing completely or reads with zero logic. As a user, how would you feel? Would you know what the chapters are about? Get a sense of what the book is about?

If you want Google to understand what your website is about and how it is put together, then make sure and communicate it properly – which is the first step for proper site architecture.

Let us pick on a few common, simplistic examples:

/about-us (About who?)

/contact-us (Contact who?)

/products/ (What kind of products?)

/articles (Articles about what?)

/categories (Category about what?)

And my very favorite…

/blog (Blog? What is that about? Could be anything in the world)

These sub-directories within the infrastructure of your website are key components – they are the “chapter names” in your book. Naming something “articles” lacks the relevancy and key signals to describe what your chapter is about.

The upper level sub-directories are known as parent level pages, which means any pages underneath them are child level pages. As you build and scale child level pages, it should be categorized under the proper parent level page. This allows all of the related content of the children pages to “roll up” and become relevant for the parent level page.

Google thrives on this sort of organization, as it provides a good user experience for their users, as well as communicating systematically what the pages are supposed to be about and how they are related to each other.

Example of a proper architecture

As you can see from this example, the relevancy of the two category levels (business plan template & how to write a business plan) all have relevancy that rolls up to the term business plans.

Then as you drill down one level deeper, you can see that you would isolate and build pages that are for business plan outline and business plan samples. These both roll up to the business plan template category.

Through proper keyword targeting and research you would locate the primary keyword driver that matches the page intent and high volume for the URL naming conventions. This communicates to Google what the page will be about as well as matching high customer demand from a search perspective.

Most brand or product teams create and name a structure based on internal reasons, or no particular reason at all. So rather than applying search filters after the fact and trying to retrofit, do the research and understand the volume drivers – then apply them to the architectural plan. You will have significant gains in your rankings and share of voice.

With a structure like this, every page has a home and a purpose. This architecture not only is designed for “current state” but also will scale easily for “future state”. It becomes very easy to add child categories under the primary silo category thus allowing you to scale easily and move up funnel to capture new market share and volume.

How does user experience (UX) play a role in architecture?

A common crossroads we encounter is the UX as it relates to search, content marketing and architecture. UX typically wants minimal content, limited navigational options and a controlled user journey.

However, keep in mind that a UX journey is considered from one point of entry (typically the home page), while search if done properly – every page becomes a point of entry. So we need to solve for both.

The good news is that pure architecture structure and URL naming schemes is and can be completely different than the UX. Build the architecture the proper way and you can still apply any UX as an overlay.

Where the primary differences come in is between UX and navigation. Here again, UX typically wants to limit the choices and control the journey, which means that the navigation is reduced and not all architectural levels are available and visible.

The challenge here is that you want Google to rank you number one in the world for all of these pages; however, you are also telling Google they are not important enough to you to even be in your navigation.

A rule of thumb I learned almost 20 years ago is to make sure every page can stand on its own. A user should never have to go “back” in order to go forward. So make sure your navigation and categorical pages are available from every page, especially knowing for organic search, a user will enter your site and the journey at every level.

Now does this mean abandoning UX? No. You can still control the journey through your primary CTAs and imagery, without sacrificing navigation or architecture.

Your web browser (called the “client”) begins the exchange by submitting a request to the web server for code, images, and other information.

The web server, always on the alert, returns a tiny message that says, “I received your request and here is what you can expect in the next few moments.”

This tiny message, including a server response code, is helpful to both the waiting client and human beings optimizing the experience.

Server response codes may appear to be errors at first glance; they’re most obvious when what the user wants to happen, doesn’t. On deeper inspection, these informational codes exist for every properly functioning online interaction. Server response codes, also called status codes, are feedback that your website is built correctly and web server functioning as intended.

Status Code Ranges

A status code’s leading number indicates its general meaning, making the codes predictable even if you don’t know the details. Every career SEO ought to know these by heart.

2xx – Successful

The general goal is to send the client to a web page with this response code range.

3xx – Redirection

4xx – Client Error

The request went wrong and the error is by the client. The most frequent response in this range is a broken link—the client requests information not existing on the server.

5xx – Server Error

The request went wrong and the error is by the server. Fixing this generally requires developer intervention.

Typical Status Codes

A large number of status codes are reserved by consensus, so web professionals can share an understanding of standard responses. The codes below appear regularly when you’re responsible for a website experience.

200 – OK

A 200 response from the server means, “Everything is great, and I’m sending the information you requested.”

This response code is generally ideal. Every first time a web page loads in your browser, this is the code received. To a search engine crawler, a 200 code says “I want you to keep this link as-is in your index.”

How could this response be an error? A few weeks ago I was looking to buy a shirt. A specific brand ranked well in search results and I immediately found pages of product links from their site that fit what I wanted. I clicked on the first product link and landed on the correct page, but there was no way to choose options or buy the shirt.

I went back to the search results and tried every link from that brand on the first page, with the same result.

With some research, I found that their web server showed a 200 response for every page that ever existed on their site. Because of this, old products were not removed from the search index and outranked buyable products in search results.

301 – Redirect Permanently

Instead of loading the old information, the server begins an updated request—a 301 response leads to a 200 response from the new location.

If the client is a search engine, the requested location is replaced by the new location in a search index.

A 301 response is ideal for correcting visitors who come to the wrong version of your domain, like non-www redirecting to www. This code is also great when you update and move content within your site. The idea is to make sure visitors to the old content are redirected to the updated content instead.

This response code is an error when the old location is still relevant, should be indexed, and needs to retain indexing signals. It’s also an error when the new location isn’t relevant to the old location; misuse of redirects is a common spam indicator.

302 – Found/Temporary Redirect

Temporary redirects acknowledge the client’s request and say, “I found the information you want, but it’s somewhere different at the moment.”

The server begins a new request, resulting in a 200 response from the new location. If the client is a search engine, the originally requested location is retained in a search index.

Google’s John Mueller has pointed out their algorithm does not penalize for 302 redirects, and the index will eventually treat a 302 as a 301 if it remains long enough. Likewise, a 301 response may be treated as a 302 by Google if there are enough signals to them that the old location is preferred.

This response code causes problems when a link should lead to a permanent new location (301) or a not found (404) response instead. Some developers erroneously chain 302 and 301 redirects together, increasing a page’s load time with every redirect.

304 – Not Modified

The 304 status code redirects to a file previously cached by the client.

The server says, “I have your request, but the information you want hasn’t changed since the last time you asked for it. Let’s not waste time; get the file you downloaded last time.”

This response code involves a lot of logic between the client and server in order to communicate how long cached information will be accurate. It can also indicate when cached information should be updated with a fresh download.

This status code doesn’t get nearly the attention its 3xx siblings do, but when you hear, “Please clear your cache to see the changes,” or have a talk about cache expiration headings, 304 is your code. Balancing caching with fresh content is an art complicated enough to warrant its own article.

403 – Forbidden

A 403 response is the server saying, “I understand your request but I won’t give you the information.”

This response is given when the client doesn’t have the access level the server requires. It’s a correct response when an unauthorized client is attempting to access sensitive areas of a website. This status is usually sent to search engines who try to crawl administration pages of a website.

This status code is an error when you intend the client to access the information. This happens commonly with over-engineered robots.txt files, but can be the result of a misconfigured web server.

404 – Not Found

The server says, “I can’t find that information, and it probably never existed.”

The most widely-recognized status code, a 404 serves the important function of informing the client that what it seeks does not exist.

Some people are so convinced the 404 is a complete error that they’ll go to great lengths to prevent a server from using it at all. They may redirect clients instead, leading to loops of links where the searcher never finds what they want as they follow a path that doesn’t end.

The 404 tells search engine crawlers that they’ve found a dead end and should look to another location—important when a crawler has limited resources to spend on a website.

The 404 response is not usually an error with the server, but the result of outdated or mistyped links leading to that location. If you see multiple 404 results from internal site links, fix the offending links immediately. If you see multiple 404 results from external links that can’t be updated, consider a 410 response instead.

410 – Gone

This status code is the server’s way of saying, “That information used to exist, but doesn’t anymore.”

It tells search engine crawlers and other websites that the requested information was available only for a limited time, and they should remove their links to it.

Search engine crawlers will continue to test a 404 page in case it’s appearing in error, but a 410 response is regarded as absolute. Because of the 410 status code’s specific meaning, developers often choose to prevent mistakes by returning a 404 for all “not found” and “gone” instances.

503 – Service Unavailable

The 5xx range codes take more digging to fix, and function as actual server errors. The 503 status code is more common—used when the server is overloaded and unable to respond to requests. The overload could be the result of misconfiguration, or a sudden and extreme increase in website traffic.

In Summary

Server response codes are an important aspect of understanding the information sharing process. Knowing each code’s appropriate use is a necessary skill, even if it’s not your role to configure the server itself. The idea is to communicate exactly what you intend, and the correct configuration depends on your goals.

We all know that duplicate content is a bad thing, right? But what is it? And why is it bad? To fully understand the issue of duplicate content, we need to look at it not from the context of a website owner, but rather from the perspective of a search engine trying to provide the […]

We all know that duplicate content is a bad thing, right? But what is it? And why is it bad?

To fully understand the issue of duplicate content, we need to look at it not from the context of a website owner, but rather from the perspective of a search engine trying to provide the best possible experience to its users. From that primary standpoint we can then carry the principles forward to consider how that can impact a website and its organic traffic.

Understanding Duplicate Content

Because this is a basics article, we’re going to keep things simple (or at least, as simple as anything in SEO can be):

Duplicate content is content which appears in more than one location on the Internet.

Inherently there is nothing specifically wrong with duplicate content.

Let’s take for example an article on blue widgets written by Bill over at abcwidgets.com. I run xyzwidgets.com and really like the article. With Bill’s permission I copy the article into my site providing proper reference to its source. What’s wrong with that? Legally, ethically, and even from a business standpoint? Nothing.

In this example I’d decided that the content is so useful I’d like to share it with my own visitors, but want to keep them on my site. But what happens when I view the same scenario from the perspective of a search engine?

The question then has to be posed, which of these two articles deserves to rank and how does the engine know?

Many factors come into play at this point – the amount of duplicated content on the page and on the site as a whole, the relative strength of the sites, and which copy got seen first. But at its core, I always assume that the last factor here (first seen) gets the credit. This isn’t always the case, but if we have to pick a rule-of-thumb, this works.

So what happens to my site with the duplicated page?

It won’t rank for that page.

The weight of that page will be negligible.

A point against the site as a reliable source of quality, unique content will be registered.

Now, this may seem unfair (and a decent argument you’d have), but we have to remember that the example above isn’t the sum total of what the engines have to deal with. We’ll be discussing below a few of the more common “ethical” duplicate content issues but it’s important to keep in mind that not all strategies that have been used are in the best interest of searchers or even visitors.

Whole networks of websites have been built that focus only on duplicating content found elsewhere on the web in hopes of capturing search traffic. They’re not built to add value and they generally don’t.

One need only consider mass article syndication to get a feel for where it went wrong in the eyes of the engines; the same content on hundreds of sites with little or no quality control and with content across a massive range of subjects. Essentially we had pages with no value to the user and even less to Google all in the effort by those submitting to game the system for links and of the article sites to attract traffic for their impression-based ads.

To deal with all these types of issues, search engines had to adjust the way they valued duplicate content. Let’s remember, they have to use an algorithm, and algorithms aren’t great at making exceptions.

So, knowing that we’re not here to argue with the engines about who’s right and knowing that being right or wrong doesn’t earn you traffic in this context, we need to ensure that even if what we’re doing is right for our visitors, that it can’t be confused with something that isn’t. Fortunately there are methods in place to deal with the variety of duplicate content types. So let’s explore those.

While there is a wide array of duplicate content types, the majority of sites contain one or more of only a handful. Here we’re going to look at the most common types of duplicate content and discuss how to address them and what this means to the site owner.

Copied Page(s)

The Situation: Let’s start with the example we touched on above. I’m a site owner who has found a great piece of content on a different site I would like to share on my site.

The Issue: The issue you’ll face is that this content is going to be valued poorly on your site and may contribute to an overall domain score quality drop.

The Fix: A cross-domain canonical tag is the only fix here. You’ll need to add a canonical tag to the page indicating that the original source of the content is at a different location. It would resemble:

This will tell the engines that you know the article is copied, it is intentionally placed on your site and all link weight to that page should pass to the original location of the article.

The Downside: All link weight will pass to the original source of the article. Looking at how PageRank passes between pages, if you have 10 internal links on a page and one points to a canonicalized page you will retain only 90 percent of the weight (an over-simplification but it will do as an example). That said, if the content is useful to your visitors then the increase in time on site and visitor loyalty will exceed any decrease in PageRank.

Duplicated Product Information

The Situation: You run an ecommerce site selling blue widgets from a variety of manufacturers. These manufacturers provide you with product information (titles, descriptions, specs, and images) to post on your site.

The Issue: The manufacturers are also providing the exact same information to everyone else who’s selling their products.

The Fix: While specs remain the same and duplication is acceptable across multiple sites, you need to set your site apart. This will generally involve writing new product descriptions, taking new photos, and hopefully adding content unique to your site such as reviews.

The Downside: The only real downside here is time. It takes a lot of time to write custom product descriptions, but if it’s not worth the time to write them, one has to wonder if it’s worth having the product on your site at all (i.e., if the ROI is so low at that level, is the product really going to be profitable?)

To hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, here’s Google’s Matt Cutts talking about exactly this topic:

Sorting and Multi-Page Product Lists

The Situation: You run an ecommerce site and that site has sorting options that generate unique URLs or has multiple pages of the same core products. An example of this would be eBay where they have large number of product pages in most categories which then changes orders (or products in the list) depending on how the list is ordered or which page of the category you’re on.

The Issue: If you have a page with 20 items and a different URL is generated when those items are sorted by price as opposed to alphabetically (for example) then you essentially end up with 2 pages with the same content at different URLs.

The Fix: Once again the solution is the canonical tag. For each page that is a sub-page of the initial category URL you would add the canonical tag to the initial category URL. This will ensure that they’re not picked up as duplicate content and further ensure that the link weight is all passed in the right direction.

The Downside: For once there is no downside. On top of addressing the issue of duplicate content this strategy will also ensure that any weight passed to the sub-pages in the sorting options (either internally of from external links) will get passed back to the core category page resulting in a stronger landing page.

WWW vs. Non-WWW & Duplicate Homepages

The Situation: Your site can be found at both the www and non-www URLs (www.abcbluewidets.com and abcbluewidets.com) and/or your homepage can be found at both the root level (www.abcbluewidets.com) and file-based URL (www.abcbluewidgets.com/index.html).

The Issue: While the engines are generally good and figuring this issue out, it’s not a good idea to rely on “generally”. This can create a duplicate content issue and also cause links to the “wrong” URL to not get credited to your site correctly.

The Fix: While a canonical tag will fix this, the better route to go is with a 301 and to permanently redirect to the proper location. This will ensure that all requests for a resource resolve to the same location.

Different servers have different methods for accomplishing this. As there are a variety of different things you may wish to accomplish (redirecting index.html to the root of all folders vs. simply the homepage for example), you can visit http://www.seobook.com/archives/001714.shtml. Most of the codes can be found there (hat tip to Tony Spencer on that one).

These codes are for Apache servers. If your site is hosted on a Windows server I recommend chatting with you system admin as it’ll require access to IIS for some of the more advanced functions.

The Downside: There is a small amount of link juice that dissipates through a 301 redirect effectively reducing the weight being passed to the target page. For that reason, even with all the right 301’s and canonical tags in place, it’s important to ensure that all internal links or links you create point to the correct desired URL whenever possible.

Conclusion

As long as you’re aware of the issues of duplicate content it’s nothing to fear. It happens, Google knows it happens (even accidentally).

Ensuring that you do everything you can to take ownership of how weight and authority pass through that duplication ensures that you don’t “get spanked” by appearing to be unethically attempting to manipulate the results. Further, addressing duplicate content will help ensure that weight passes efficiently through your site with priority given to the correct pages.

While many of the fixes can take time, anything worth doing right generally does. Fixing duplicate content issues can generate some of the biggest ROI from an hour-in-visitor-out perspective of almost any SEO activity.

They represent all the phrases which you type into Google search box when surfing the net. Having this in mind, you can quickly establish that SEO is a user-oriented profession.

In fact, expert’s proficiency can be measured by their ability to discover trending keywords and rank for them. In other words, SEOs ability to perform keyword research.

Similarly to any commercial products, there are two main things that should concern us – the strength of our competition and the demand for a certain keyword.

By using SEO terminology, we can say that two main factors of keyword research are:

Search Volume (number of monthly searches)

Keyword Difficulty (competitiveness of a keyword)

Unfortunately, unlike a classic economy where everything is quantifiable, things get a bit troublesome in the world of SEO. We usually rely on stats provided by the Google Keyword Planner tool which is based on PPC (pay per click) or paid search. It is really hard to establish the real state of things and it usually comes down to approximation.

But, we will discuss that later on in the article so stay tuned. For now, let’s start with the basics.

What type of keywords should I pursue?

There are two types of keywords that you should consider during your keyword research:

Those that can bring you profit (so called “money” or commercial keywords)

Those that can bring you traffic and links (also known as informative keywords)

Most websites exist so they could make a profit. In the majority of the cases, the products are directly sold through the website and shipped all over the country/world. This is why it is necessary to rank for keywords that will lure potential customers to your website and increase your sales.

Whenever you create some content, you have to consider your potential clients. What kind of a keyword will they use when searching for a product? These phrases will usually include descriptive words such as buy, cheap, affordable, etc.. They will help your customer pinpoint just the thing they need.

Unfortunately, as keywords become more commercially oriented, they will also become more competitive. For example, phrases with “buy” and “cheap” in them are among hardest ones to rank on the Internet.

Nevertheless, you still have to try and rank for them as they are the best way for you to remain profitable. On the other hand, you can search for keywords that will attract additional traffic.

Why would I do that, you might ask?

Simply put, unless you have enormous amount of money to spend on an aggressive marketing pay-per-click campaign (such as the one performed by Amazon), you will have to build your website from the ground up which will ultimately bring a lot of organic traffic.

You will require more links and shares to get to that point and the best way to get them it by writing about things that will interest larger audience. Here, I am not only referring to potential clients but also news websites, popular blogs within your niche and industry experts.

Let’s use this example. You are selling tractors. One of the first articles which you posted on your blog is about different types of tractors. Naturally, you are trying to promote your own tractors by linking to your product pages. If the piece is awesome, you might get several links and a nice bunch of shares.

As an alternative, you can create an awesome article about new agricultural measures. It may elaborate something that everybody is talking about and ultimately, it will give your website a lot of buzz.

The drawback of this second method is that your website won’t be making any profit. Yes, there will be a lot of visitors on your website but this will not be commercial audience. When it comes to selling your tractors, the conversion rate will be minimal. However, this is a good initial step towards building your brand and online presence.

For short-term goals, money keywords should be prioritized. For long-term, you need both types. Bear in mind, no matter what you do, you will have to use commercial keywords as a way to keep your website afloat.

Structure of a keyword

The structure and length of a keyword is one of the crucial things that are directly correlated to its difficulty and volume.

As I previously mentioned, there are certain types of keywords that are significantly more difficult to rank for. On the other hand, there are those that constantly have high or low volume or may even fluctuate. A Good example is “Summer Olympics”.

Length of a keyword is another factor that is important for volume and difficulty. As you can presume, volume becomes lower for longer keywords and vice versa. Based on their length, we can differentiate three types of keywords:

Short-tail keywords (1 to 2 words)

Medium-tail keywords (3 to 4 words)

Long-tail keywords (longer than 4)

When it comes to structure, we can differentiate:

Head (main word or a phrase which is the centerpiece of the search)

Modifier (a word which can be substituted for other words in order to change a single aspect of the keywords meaning)

Tail (all other words used to describe or explain our query)

Short-tail keywords are the simplest formation. They only have a head word. Generally speaking, it is nearly impossible to rank for such a phrase due to extensive competition. However, they do bring an enormous traffic.

Medium-tail keywords are just the thing we are looking for. As you can presume, 3 to 4 word phrases are extremely sought after. They definitely do not have the same volume as short-tail keywords but with them, you stand a chance of ranking.

Long-tail keywords are longer phrases than four words. Even though they are really easy to rank for, they are often neglected due to their low volume. However, long tails can also be quite powerful when you rank for a lot of them at the same time.

Basically, when you perform research, you should focus on phrases that have medium volume and low or medium difficulty (thus medium-tail keywords). But, there is a catch. Keyword research doesn’t stop when you find such a phrase. Instead, you need to focus on those medium-tail keywords that are performing better than the rest.

If a keyword has lower volume, it needs to compensate by being easier to rank for. On the flipside, if it has medium difficulty, it needs to have higher search volume to justify the effort.

Finding keyword ideas

In order to do keyword research properly, we need a lot of initial ideas that will lead us during the process. Based on the previous chapters, you somewhat understand what is required from you. Now, let’s find a way to detect all those phrases that can have a positive impact on our sales.

It is usually recommended that you start from your main product or service which you are offering. Commercial keyword research is much more limited. You already know what you have to focus on and you will do everything to optimize around that phrase. On the other hand, if you wish to boost website’s stats, you are able to create different content.

Always have in mind that besides your own industry, you can also tap into niche markets. They include all the topics that are somewhat related to you but are not exactly what you are offering. We can call them shoulder niches.

How to find keywords

Let’s review all the tools and approaches you can us to get keyword ideas:

1) Google auto-suggest and searches related to

Google itself is a keyword suggestion tool. For example, when you start typing in a phrase the search engine will start completing your sentences, giving you 10 suggestions as you go.

At the same time, on the bottom of every page there will be “Searches related to” section. Here, Google will give you eight additional suggestions that are closely related to your topic.

However, due to its limitations, the biggest search engine can only be used as a way to get basic understanding of the topic. Nevertheless, it is a solid starting point.

2) Wikipedia

Oftentimes when we look for something on the internet, we turn to Wikipedia as a source of extensive knowledge. Even though there are better sources for particular topics, this website is still considered as the best and most comprehensive encyclopedia.

By entering your main keyword in its search engine, you will get a page with a description. Here, in the table of content, you can get other relevant topics and sub-categories.

Most of these sub-categories are really extensive and they can be used as source to additional research. We refer to them as shoulder niches or niches that are in some way related to our own niche.

3) Quora, Yahoo! Answers and forums

For some time now, Quora and Yahoo! Answers have been the two best places for finding answers to all your questions. Nevertheless, every industry has its own forums that are recognized as good source of information.

Now, here is the general idea. If someone has already looked for something on forums, there is a high chance they will use the same (or similar) phrase in Google search bar. By using these platforms, you can easily learn what are the trending topics, what are people interested in and subsequently, what is going to bring most traffic to your website.

BoardReader.com is a forum search engine that can be extremely useful when it comes to collecting keyword ideas from forums and online boards. Simply enter your keyword in its search box and you’ll be given lots of keyword ideas directly from forums which you won’t be able to find anywhere else.

4) Google Trends and Google Correlate

As I mentioned, search volume for keywords is not static. It fluctuates. If you are an SEO expert, you should recognize rising and falling trends and act accordingly. This is why many experts like to use Google Trends as the initial point of their research.

If the number of searches per keyword is rising, this means that we have a chance of creating awesome content before the topic becomes too popular and hard to rank for. Furthermore, Google Trends can show you from where the majority of the traffic is coming from and give you some additional keyword ideas.

Google Correlate is part of Google Trends. It uses as a scale of 1 to -1 to show you the level of correlation between your starting keyword and all the other phrases. To rephrase, it shows the search patterns where some keywords are likely to rise or fall together with your main keyword.

5) Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is one of the most commonly mentioned tools when it comes to keyword suggestions and there is a good reason for it. This tool is based on AdWords system where search engine is able to calculate volume, competitiveness and price for each keyword.

Unfortunately, when it comes to volume and competition, it is based on paid search not the organic one. As of late, Google focused on using it primarily for PPC. So, unless you invest some money in paid campaign, you cannot get good results.

Nevertheless, it is still a good tool for getting keyword ideas. First, you need to access “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas” option.

Keyword ideas (a list with keywords that are closely related to your main keyword)

Although you can only use keyword ideas, I strongly recommend that you also use Ad group ideas. It will widen the scope of your search a lot.

For example, if you use “cat food” keyword, you will instantly get several suggested phrases consisting of both “cat” and “food”. They will have volume, suggested bid, competition and other stats. However, if you use Ad group ideas before Keyword ideas, you can get a list with all the other related groups of keywords such as “cat toys” and “pet food”.

As you see with Ad group ideas you not only get suggestions based on your main keyword but also semantically related words and phrases that your competition might not even know they exist.

6) Keyword Shitter

This rather simplistic keyword suggestions tool is considered as one of the most comprehensive tools of its kind on the internet. Besides the fact that it is easy to use, it provides amazing results.

All you have to do is type in a keyword and this program will give you a huge list of suggestions. To refine search, you can use positive and negative filters that will include or exclude certain word or phrase.

This tool needs some time to retrieve all the results but it is more than worth it. Word of caution – after a while it will start giving unrelated results. Because of it, you will have to be careful when assessing them.

After your list is complete just head back to Google Keyword Planner, copy-paste the list of results Keyword Shitter got you add the most lucrative keywords to your list.

7) Keywordtool.io

Another great free SEO tool on our list, Keyword.io is pretty solid when it comes to extracting keyword from various sources. You can use Google, Bing, YouTube, Amazon and other search engines and add suggestions to your list.

For example, you can add several suggestions from Google and then start browsing Bing and add several suggestions from Bing. What makes this tool so special is the fact that it doesn’t only give you words to add before and after your main keyword, but it does this for every letter in the alphabet.

For example, if your main word is “organic food”, Keyword.io will give you ideas like “best organic food” or “organic food delivery” for every letter from A to Z.

At the end of the process, you can export all these results to use later on in Google Keyword Planner of some other tool of your choice.

8) SEMRush

When it comes to reverse engineering your competitors’ SEO, SEMRush is definitely the tool which you always have to have in your arsenal. Its unique advantage lies is its ability to show very accurate organic and PPC data for almost every website.

This great program can be used to spy on your competition and check out their keywords (among other things). Just enter the URL of your main competitors in SEMRush and see exactly where their organic traffic is coming from.

It will give you pretty accurate data allowing you to copy the strategy of your competition. SEMRush shows all the ranking keywords of a website and their current positions in Google together with the percentage of traffic they bring and many other useful stats. It is a great way to get some fresh keyword ideas that no other tool can show you.

Assessing the keywords and your competition

You probably have an extensive list of results in front of you by now. That’s great!

Now, you need to examine all of them and find just the right keyword that has greatest potential.

If I wrote this article a couple of months ago, I would definitely suggest using Google Keyword Planner. Due to the significant changes that Keyword Planner undertook, it is no longer an option that’s free for everyone. Google wanted to place emphasis on PPC users that spend money on AdWords . As an organic user, you won’t get the full scope of things.

But, there are other tools which can be used. During this part of research, you have to determine search volume and keyword difficulty of a keyword. You also need to see how much work it will take to reach top rankings in Google which can be done by analyzing the links of your competitors as well as the strength of their websites.

How to use your keyword research tools

Some things can be done quickly and painlessly without having to invest a cent. But, during this stage, it is recommended to invest some money in tools.

Have in mind that you are able to perform the entire research without spending any money. But, for optimal results, you might consider getting some of the keyword research tools from the list.

Now, let’s see what kind of programs you need.

1) io – assessing keyword volume

Maybe Google Keyword Planner changed but Keywordtool.io hasn’t. The tool is based on the same data which can be found in Google Keyword Planner. In fact, it extracts all the info from it. So, even though Keyword Planner is no longer an option, you have a suitable replacement.

It provides three basic types of data:

Volume (total number of monthly searches in Google)

CPC (cost-per-click or the amount of money that bidders pay for that particular keyword)

AdWords Competition (number of people bidding for that keyword)

Although this data is based on PPC, it does show us how competitive and popular a keyword is. Be cautious though because this is only an approximation. It doesn’t show the real state of organic traffic.

Similarly to Keyword Shitter, you have a positive and negative filter which allows you to include or exclude certain words to your liking. On top of that, you can further filter your search by looking for data either in Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon or App Store. As you can presume, Keywordtool.io is also good for getting new keyword ideas.

2) Moz Keyword Explorer – assessing keyword difficulty

Next step of the process is determining the difficulty of your keyword. Although Keywordtool.io is great at accessing the volume, it doesn’t evaluate keyword difficulty. Instead, you should use Moz Keyword Explorer. This tool is by far the best way to assess how difficult a keyword is.

The three basic stats that this tool provides are:

Difficulty (how difficult it is to rank higher than the articles which are already ranking)

Opportunity (estimated organic click-through-rate)

Potential (combination of previous scores)

Together with the previously mentioned tool, Keyword Explorer can help us understand what to expect from a keyword. Its algorithms that assess difficulty are quite precise and I would full-heartedly recommend them.

The fact that this is a freemium tool makes it that much better. Just register an account with Moz and you’ll get five free searches per day.

Besides this basic data, it also shows you other keyword suggestions, SERP analysis and keyword mentions. It is a very practical way to analyze the first page of results and check your competition.

3) MozBar – Assessing domain authority

MozBar is something that every blogger should have regardless of whether they are performing keyword research or not.

This nifty extension is completely free and you can get it through Google Web Store. It shows you the PA and DA (page and domain authority of websites).

Whenever you search for a keyword in Google, you will get a list of all the top competitors. With this extension, you can see page and domain authority score of each one of the top 10 ranking websites without having to click on every page individually.

With that, we come to our next point.

4) Manually checking the first page

People tend to forget that the process of keyword research isn’t exclusively based on tool usage. Human factor also plays a role as you go to the first page of results and check all the competitors with your own eyes (also known as eyeballing).

No matter what you do, I always suggest that you start by checking keyword’s volume and difficulty. It is a necessity that will save you a lot of time later on. But, the numbers can only tell you so much. You need to eyeball each result on the first page and check all the competitors yourself.

Are there too many authoritative websites on page one? Do these results have extensive, high quality articles? If so, there is a slim chance of ranking.

On the other hand, if you notice a lot of sites with low PA and DA scores, forum results, pages on free blog platforms like wordpress.com or blogspot, it may indicate that the search is lacking quality sources.

By creating your own high quality long article, you can easily beat the competition and rank on page one. Don’t forget to build links as you go too which takes us to the last tool.

5) Ahrefs – Assessing links’ power and quantity

For now, everything seems ok. You have assessed the stats and your competition doesn’t look too stiff. Awesome! But, there is another, last step of the way. You need to check top 10 competitors’ backlinks.

Links still remain the most impactful ranking factor. That being said, you always have to check the links of other pages and see if you can beat that score. I would recommend using Ahrefs as the best tool for this particular purpose.

Ahrefs is pretty quick to notice new backlinks. On top of that, it is rather precise when doing so. The biggest issue with this tool is the price. But, if you are serious about keyword research, it is better if you get it.

Without assessing the links of your main competitors, you can never know whether you can actually rank for a keyword. Getting links can especially be problematic for brand new websites. As a result, all your efforts may be in vein.

There are two things that need to be considered:

Quantity of the links

Quality of the links

When it comes to backlinks, more is not always better. One link from a highly authoritative website can easily trump dozens coming from weaker blogs.

Again, it’s all based on free assessment. If a website has a certain number of links that doesn’t necessarily mean that we need the same number to overtake him. There are numerous additional ranking factors that have some impact. But, if the first few results have around 100 links each with average DA over 50, it can tell us where we stand and if the keyword is too difficult to penetrate.

Conclusion

SEO is not an exact science. It has never been. At best, it can be called a profession of educated guesses. Same goes with keyword research. But, similarly to other professions that are rather intangible (such as stock trading) we need a starting point which can reduce the risk of failure. In the end, there is no point in randomly selecting keywords, right?

Keyword research is a process that can be costly. At the same time, if you know the tools, you will be able to perform it for a much lower price. With this detailed guide, I hope you’ve got some basic understanding of what can work and what’s a complete waste of time. Let me know in the comments below.

You hear the term all the time, but how do you actually rank higher in the search engines? I know when I first heard the term, it sounded like some voodoo magic that only a few people understood how to use. The reality is, SEO isn’t rocket science. Some gurus would have you believe it […]

You hear the term all the time, but how do you actually rank higher in the search engines? I know when I first heard the term, it sounded like some voodoo magic that only a few people understood how to use.

The reality is, SEO isn’t rocket science. Some gurus would have you believe it takes years of dedicated study to understand it, but I don’t think that’s true. Sure, mastering the subtle nuances takes time, but the truth is that you can learn the fundamentals in just a few minutes.

So, I got to thinking, “Why don’t I lay out the basics, all in one post?”

It’s a long one, to be sure, but after years of studying SEO and working behind the scenes to help companies get first page rankings, I’m convinced this is all you need to know. If you are looking to boost your traffic so that you can increase your sales, just follow these basic guidelines.

The Traffic Trap (and How SEO Really Works)

Lots of marketers make the mistake of seeing SEO only as a source of free traffic. It’s true, free traffic is the end result, but it’s not how SEO works.

The real purpose of SEO is to help people who are looking for you find you. To do that, you have to match the content on your website to what people are trying to find.

For example:

Mary sells custom knitted sweaters. On her blog, she shows how she makes the sweaters by hand, often talking about the different yarns she uses. There’s not much competition for keywords relating to yarn, and Mary is publishing lots of great content about it, so before long, she has front page rankings for several different types of yarn.

Do you see the potential problem?

The people searching for yarn most likely knit themselves, and it’s unlikely they’ll be interested in purchasing Mary’s sweaters. She’ll get lots of traffic, sure, but none of the traffic will convert, because the visitors have completely different goals.

The lesson here: if you want SEO to work for you, you need to make sure your goals match the goals of your visitors. It’s not about traffic. It’s about figuring out what you want, and then optimizing for keywords that bring in visitors who want the same things.

How do you discover what those keywords are?

Simple: research.

Research: How to Find the Right Keywords

Sure, research is a little tedious, but it’s an indispensable part of finding the right keywords. You want to uncover keywords that:

Are supported by your content (the keywords are relevant to your site).

There are lots of tools to aid you in finding the right keywords, the most popular being Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool. It provides results based on actual Google searches, and if you are logged into an AdWords account, it will also give you a list of keyword ideas customized to the site on the account.

Before you get too far though, let’s discuss an important concept for deciding how broad or narrow you want your keywords to be. It’s called, “The Long Tail.”

The Long Tail

Popularized by Chris Anderson, the Long Tail describes a phenomenon where lots of low traffic keywords can collectively send you more visitors than a few high-traffic keywords.

For example, although Amazon may get thousands of visits from the keyword “DVD,” they get millions of visits from all of the individual DVD titles (i.e., Dark Knight, Toy Story, etc.). Individually, none of those titles get anywhere close to the traffic of a term like, “DVD,” but collectively, their volume is a lot larger than any one keyword.

How does the long tail apply to you?

When you combine them all, your long tail (unpopular) keywords should make up roughly 80% of your traffic. So, when you’re researching keywords, don’t just focus on the ones getting massive amounts of traffic. Take note of some of the less popular ones too, and then incorporate them into your overall strategy.

Crafting Your Content

After you pick the right keywords, it’s important to start crafting your content.

Search engines have bots that automatically crawl your website, “reading” it to find out what it’s about and then deciding which keywords each of your pages should rank for. You can influence their “decisions” by strategically optimizing your content for certain keywords.

This is especially true if you’re creating content bots can’t read. It’s easy for bots to interpret text, but they aren’t advanced enough yet to watch videos, look at images, or listen to audio. You’ll need to describe them, so they bot can understand and rank your pages for the appropriate keywords.

One quick word of warning, though.

Writing solely for search engines usually makes your content boring, and typically, that won’t help convert your visitors into customers. It’s far better to focus on people first, making your content as easy as possible, and then optimize for search engine bots where you can, without sacrificing the persuasiveness of your content.

Pay attention to:

Titles – Create eye-catching titles that raise the reader’s interest. You only have one chance to make a great first impression.

Keywords – Pick keywords that will help bring people to your site and are relevant.

Links – Link to quality sites that compliment what your website is about. It’ll encourage sites in your niche to link to you as well.

Quality – Try to publish unique and quality content. This prompts users to come to your site because they cannot easily find the content elsewhere.

Freshness – If you are publishing content that does not age or become outdated, that’s great, but you also need to add new content on a regular basis. If you don’t have the time to add content to your website, consider adding a question and answer section or a blog to your website.

And most importantly, do not publish someone else’s content on your site. This creates duplicate content, and search engines can penalize you for it.

Optimizing Your Code

With that in mind, there are eight different sections of your code you need to optimize. To help demonstrate these points, I am going to use examples from zeldman.com and stuffandnonsense.co.uk, two popular web designers that take different approaches in their site markup.

Title Tags

Title tags encase the title of your site. To demonstrate, this is the code from zeldman.com:

<title> Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report</title>

Here, Zeldman puts the emphasis on his name and the name of the site. If you wanted to find it in the search engines, you would probably search for, “Jeffrey Zeldman” or “the Daily Report.”

Let’s take a look at the other site:

<title>Fantastic web site design in Flintshire, North Wales from Stuff and Nonsense</title>

Stuffannonsense.co.uk took a different approach. By putting the site name at the end, they emphasize what the website is about. You’d most likely find them by searching for, “web design in Flintshire, North Wales,” or a variation thereof.

The bottom line: when coding your title tags, make sure keywords are in the title. To further maximize search engine results, each page should have a unique title tag.

Meta Tags

The main meta tag you should be concerned with is called the, “meta description tag.” It doesn’t have much of an impact on your search engine ranking, but it tells visitors what your site is about, so it can have a big impact on whether they decide to click through or not.

<meta name=”description” content=”Looking for fantastic web site design in North Wales? Stuff and Nonsense are world renowned web designers based in North Wales.” />

Can you spot the keywords Zeldman.com and stuffandnonsense.co.uk emphasize?

Zeldman was very thorough by mentioning his other projects. If you do a Google search for “Zeldman,” zeldman.com comes up first. Happy Cog and A List Apart also show up. If you have multiple online interests, you might want to take Zeldman’s approach and keyword them in the description meta tag.

Stuff and Nonsense emphasizes the type of visitor who should visit their site. By asking the question, “Looking for fantastic website design in North Wales?” they make it crystal clear that it’s a site built for people looking for web design. If you’re one of those people, it would probably stand out to you.

When creating meta tag descriptions, make sure your keywords are in your description, using full sentences. Don’t make the description too long, though, or it might get cut off. If possible, also try to make each page have a unique meta description.

Headings

These are very similar to headings in a book, but these come in a specific order. H1, H2, H3, H4, and so on, with H1 starting the page as the main heading. The remaining heading codes descend to lower level headings on the site.

For example:

<h1>How to Optimize Your Business for Search Engines</h1>

<h2>The ABCs of SEO</h2>

<h3>Research</h3>

Note the pattern. The more specific your content becomes, the higher the number of the heading.

Generally, there should only be one H1 tag on each page, and you can have as many h2s, h3s, and h4s as needed. Also, make sure your headings contain keywords and are relevant to the content on your website.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are like a roadmap for search engines. They give bots directions to all of the different pages on your website, making sure they find everything.

There are two types of sitemaps you can create: HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps. The main difference is XML sitemaps are coded specifically for search engines to read, while HTML sitemaps are easy for people to read too. You can link to them, giving the visitor an overview of everywhere they go.

If you have less than a few hundred pages, you should place a link to each page in your HTML sitemap. If your web site has a few thousand pages or more, just link to the most important pages.

XML sitemaps, on the other hand, contain every page of your web site, even if your web site has a million pages. You can use tools like the XML Sitemap Creator to automatically create a sitemap for you. Once your XML sitemap is created, you then want to submit it to Google Webmaster Central and Bing so that the major search engines can crawl and index your web site.

Domain Name

Domain names that contain keywords within them rank a lot higher than domains without keywords. Exact match domain names rank even higher.

But there’s a cost: exact match domains aren’t very unique. The reason why you see many companies use made-up words for their domain name is you can build a brand around it, instead of fighting the existing meaning.

Which is better?

It depends.

If your traffic comes purely from search engines, then using an exact match domain name may be a smart decision for you. For example Diamonds.com and Hotels.com will always rank well for “diamonds” and “hotels” because their domain name is keyword rich.

If SEO is only a small part of your strategy, however, go with something more unique. A decade ago, no one was searching for “Google,” but now it’s a huge brand. The same goes for sites like Zappos and Zillow.

URL Structure

URLs are another important but often overlooked part of SEO.

If your URLs are messy, search engines will have a hard time crawling them, and if search engines have a hard time crawling them, they will not be able to index your site, which means you will not rank in the search engines.

Keep these factors in mind to make your URLs more search engine friendly:

Other SEOs also talk about no-following internal links, such as to their terms of service, but pagerank sculpting does not work anymore. If you want to block pages such as your terms of service, the best way to do this is to exclude it in your robots.txt file.

Alt Tags

For search engine bots to properly index images, alt tags need to be added to each image, adding a brief description. For example, if there was an image of a “blue widget”, I would tell the search engine that the image is a blue widget by using an alt tag. It would look something like this:

In addition, make sure your image names are relevant to the image. The picture of the blue widget would be called bluewidget.jpg instead of image3.jpg.

Links

Links are maybe the most important part of SEO. The more web sites that link to your web site, the higher your web pages will rank.

The reason links have a high value in SEO is that it is easy for anyone to do research, modify their content, or create content, but is hard to convince hundreds or thousands of web sites to link to you. In the eyes of a search engine, the more trustworthy, non-spammy sites are linking to you, the more authority you must have on the topic.

Before we get into how to build links, here are some things you need to know. In general:

Links within content are more effective than links in a sidebar or footer

Links from related sites are better than links from non-relevant sites

Anchor text plays the most important role in link building. If you want to rank for “blue widget” then you want the anchor text of the link to be “blue widget”.

Here are some things to avoid:

Links from spammy or irrelevant sites.

Site wide links can hurt more than they may help.

If all of your links are rich in anchor text, it can hurt you.

Reciprocal links (I link to you and you link to me) are not too effective.

If you buy text links and get caught, you can get banned from a search engine.

Here are a few ways you can increase your link count:

Social media – getting on sites like Digg or StumbleUpon don’t just drive a ton of traffic. The increase in visibility also improves your chances of getting linked to.

Directories – There are many directories on the web. Take the time to submit your web site to the ones that compliment your content.

The top 100 – If you want to rank for a specific keyword, the best links you can get are from sites that already rank in the top 100 search results for that keyword. Granted, some of the sites that rank for the term you are trying to rank for are your competitors, so they will not link to you, but some will not be your competition and you can always shoot them a nice email asking them to link to you.

Forums – Many forums allow you to create signatures, in which you can link back to your web site. As long as those links are not no-followed, they will help with your rankings.

Competition – The easiest way to get links is to see who links to your competition and write them an email telling them the benefits of your web site compared to your competition. Roughly, 5% of the web sites you email will also add your link.

Dead links – There are billions of links on the web, so expect a good portion of those links to die over time. Web sites go down and many of the links pointing to that web site are still active. If you email those web sites informing them of the dead link, and that your content is similar, there is a good chance they will replace the dead link to one going to your website.

Conclusion

If you implement all of the advice here, your traffic from search engines will increase.

Just be patient. It takes time for search engines to update their records, as they have to crawl billions of websites.

Also, note that it will take time to figure out what works for your site. What works for site A might not work for site B. There aren’t any shortcuts. If you do anything shady to speed things up, eventually you will get caught and punished. It’s never worth it.

A better approach?

Figure out what people are looking for

Create a site that gives it to them

3. Optimize for search engines, so they help people find you

It’s not just smart SEO. It’s what search engines want you to do.

Ultimately, their goal is to have the best websites for every given topic show up at the top. So if you work hard to create the best website, and then promote it effectively, eventually they will catch up.

Just keep the above points in mind to help guide you. It takes time, and it’s a lot of hard work, but if you stick with it, it does pay off.